Versailles Christmas-Tide

A young boy lies ill with scarlet fever in a French boarding school, miles from home, as Christmas approaches. His parents receive the news and make an urgent journey across the channel to reach their son. What follows is an intimate memoir of that Christmas-tide spent in Versailles: the fear, the tender vigil, the strange comfort of a foreign city during the most wonderful time of year. Mary Stuart Boyd writes with a parent's raw tenderness about the vulnerability of childhood illness and the fierce, desperate love that propels a mother and father to their child's side. This is not a tale of recovery or reunion at any cost, but a quiet meditation on what it means to wait and worry in a place that is neither home nor hospital, while the holidays sparkle just outside the window.